Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Continued on in my extensive studies of Java through a continuation of the Arrays class. Constructed 10 programs which deal with the capabilities of Arrays, and range in capabilities from counting letters in a String or separate file to encrypting the data held within a String or separate file.

Apart from my programming studies, I have also been researching two topics: the effectiveness of learning Java as a programmer's first language of choice, and the most common type of coding used for extensive game developing projects. For the first topic, I've constructed a plethora of questions which I could ask a group of Java Professionals of regarding this query. For the latter topic, I've realized that a majority of game developing projects require a sturdy foundation in the knowledge of C or C++. Various projects such as, Battle for Wesnorth, Blender, FreeDroidRpg, and Crystal Space are online collaborative projects which specialize in designing video games (Blender and Crystal Space also specialize in developing Graphics Rendering software). C# is another popular game developing language, and is most prominently seen in the field via the use of Microsoft's Visual C# Studio, which has a library built specifically for the construction of games with their XNA subsection. Java seems to be popular in the creation of smaller games which are often embedded into web pages. Will continue to study Java, and may begin to look into C++ as well.

Monday, April 5, 2010

After finding a good amount of time to work on the research over the break, I incorporated all of the feedback I have received thus far into the formal writing. I aim to submit it to Dr. Xie so that he can look over it and share his opinions with me. I am really striving to get this work completed and published and hope to accomplish that before my time in the university is up.

Outside of the writing, I have been looking into the project and familiarizing myself with how I went about its implementation. I am documenting as I go through so that anyone in the future may know what I did in my methods of the project. I hope to also extend this to important methods that were there long before I worked on the project, but for some reason, were not documented.